Getting my T420s to boot faster: Your collective wisdom

I have a brand spanking new 1 week old T420s and I’m very happy with it so far.

I have been reading about Lenovo’s 7 second rapidboot extreme, and I get that it will only work on preloaded machines with the special BIOS etc. Mine is a work machine, so it’s has our standard company Win 7 image as well as other software. I am interested to make mine boot as fast as possible though, within the limitations I have. So far it boots in around 40s - 44s, which seems far slower than other T420s. We use disk encryption, so I measure it from when I’ve entered the encryption software password (and Win starts booting from that point), to the desktop when the cursor stops spinning. To the actual desktop itself is around 35s - 40s.

3. Intel 160GB SSD (M-class) (not sure if I have M-class, but I have an Intel 160Gb SSD)

4. Driver and service optimizations and tuning (Something I can do!)

5. One part secret sauce (??!?!)

So clearly all I can do is play with the loading of startup and services. Please note I’m not an IT person, but I’m comfortable tinkering with settings, within reason as I can’t have the machine crash. I have downloaded all the latest drivers, and installed the RapidBoot software.

Below is a snapshot from services.msc showing what services that are still automatically starting up. Honestly I don't know what some of the services are so haven't been willing to play with them in case it goes pear shaped. I would like to delay the VPN, iron mountain backup, WWAN and antivirus, but not sure where to do that, as i couldn't do it here.

So do any of you guys have suggestions on what I can do to make it boot faster?

Re: Getting my T420s to boot faster: Your collective wisdom

Its your call what you do, but usually if a compnay puts a SOE (Standard Operating Environment) on its systems, there are thing embedded in the startup which you should not be touching.

Agree, which is why I'm not going to make wholesale changes to the machine. I need the software on it, but not everyday, and not at startup.

What i'm asking for is how to delay some of the non essential software at startup. e.g.: - VPN: i use this maybe twice a week for a couple of hours max. It doesn't need to load at start up, and when i disabled it, it shaved 3s in boot time - WWAN: I do use it on the road, but generally not at startup. Right now the client has WLAN, so i haven't used it for a month at least. - Iron Mountain backup: this runs periodically, and again doesn't need to be at startup

I couldn't delay these service in services.msc. Is there another way to do it?

Also any other services that could be delayed?Exactly why I was putting the question out there was to get consensus before i changed anything

Re: Getting my T420s to boot faster: Your collective wisdom

Soluto is one such free software that you can use to check the bootup speed and what each element is conributing to the time. There are 3 divided areas that you can tweak (no way / up to you / no brainer). Each service you can read what is the function and whether you can turn off or delay..

Some services can't be delayed the normal way. I found a significant boot speed increase by delaying Kaspersky's service. Kaspersky didn't seem to complain about it, and it starts up pretty soon after hitting the desktop anyway, so I saw no harm.

One of the things that shaved 10-12 seconds off of my boot was to add a 640MB RAM + 8GB SD cache via eBoostr. Granted, you probably won't see much of an improvement on an SSD, but you might want to give the trial a go. It also significantly increased disk responsiveness under load (the drive was also audibly less thrash-y during boot with it enabled).

Re: Getting my T420s to boot faster: Your collective wisdom

Soluto is one such free software that you can use to check the bootup speed and what each element is conributing to the time. There are 3 divided areas that you can tweak (no way / up to you / no brainer). Each service you can read what is the function and whether you can turn off or delay..

Thanks Ideasmiths. I did try Soluto, but then i uninstalled in. I noticed the software sends back through to themselves all the startup info and stats of your machine. I didn't have time to read through and understand the implications of it all, so i wasn't comfortable with it.

I did notice Soluto could delay loading stuff like the VPN etc, which made a difference to the boot up time. But I also figured if the SW could do it, there must be a way i can configure it myself to do the same thing?

And I guess in a way thats what i'm asking - how can i delay the startup of the non essential SW that can't be set to Automatic (Delayed). Agree, I'm not after all out boot speed at the expense of system stability. And there is SW i still need, but I don't need them at startup.

ColonetONeill, thats exactly what I want to do - delay the startup of the antivirus, the VPN, and the backup software. But I'm not sure how to do that. I completely disabled the VPN, and it shaved 3s off the boot time.

Re: Getting my T420s to boot faster: Your collective wisdom

Be careful of unintended consequences. Iit appears that Lenovo "RapidBoot" caused our newest laptops to be detected as desktops instead, therefore our server administered group policy denied offline files from being enabled. Offline files are enabled on laptops so the users "My Documents" and other network resident resources are cached locally, even though they really reside on server disk space. What this means is that "RapidBoot" made it so our users travelling off-site would have no access to files that all of our older laptop users can access through offline files.